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Canada plays spoiler on asbestos

By Kathleen Ruff

Tues., Aug. 12, 2008

It's not every day that Canada gets to kill a UN environmental convention. With the Rotterdam Convention, which controls trade in the world's most hazardous chemicals and pesticides, Canada is coming close to achieving this result.

Increasingly, as the use of hazardous chemicals is banned or severely restricted in the industrialized world, these deadly products are shipped to developing countries and Eastern Europe, where controls are weak to non-existent, workers have few protections and infrastructure to handle hazardous chemicals is lacking.

To address this problem, the Rotterdam Convention gives countries the right to be informed about, and to refuse, extremely hazardous chemicals and pesticides.

After a rigorous scientific and legal process, a panel of experts (the chemical review committee) determines whether a particular chemical is so dangerous that it is a threat to public health and has already been banned or severely restricted by various countries.

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If so, the experts call for the chemical to be placed on a list of substances that cannot be exported to another country without first obtaining the "prior informed consent" of that country. This means countries must be informed of the dangers and have the right to refuse the product.

For more than two years, the committee has called for chrysotile asbestos (the only form of asbestos used in the world today) to be put on the list, noting that it meets every criterion in the convention. Everyone, including the industry, agrees it is deadly. Here in Canada, we scarcely use it. Instead, we export it to developing countries.

The recommendations of the expert committee represent the scientific process of the convention. Canada, in fact, nominated one of the scientists on the committee.

The political process of the convention occurs when the recommendations of the expert committee must be approved by consensus at a "conference of the parties" held every two years.

In 2006, Canada brought the convention to its knees by blocking a consensus for chrysotile asbestos to go on the list.

"It is shocking to see Canada act as an enemy of the convention," says Geoffrey Tweedale, co-author of Defending the Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry and Its Fight for Survival. "This is a tragedy for public health, a victory for the asbestos lobby and an ignoble reflection on Canada."

Canada has been the world's third biggest exporter of asbestos in the past century. Today, asbestos is a dying industry with one last asbestos company in Quebec and about 700 asbestos miners. Yet, because of its friendly relationship with the asbestos industry and because of its concern over losing votes in Quebec, the government is destroying a convention that is desperately needed to protect people in developing countries from deadly chemicals.

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The remaining asbestos miners in Quebec and their community deserve real assistance, environmental cleanup and transition funding. The federal government has given $19 million to market asbestos overseas. Surely it can provide equal funding to help the asbestos miners and stop killing the convention.

Fearing that Canada will continue its obstruction at this October's conference in Rome, the UN is now circulating to all 120 countries that have ratified the convention a "thought-starter paper" on how to get out of the "unfortunate precedent" (UN diplomatic language for disaster) created by asbestos.

The options in the paper would, through a complicated process that could take years, rewrite the convention with a dual system so that countries such as Canada, which refuse to allow the listing of a particular chemical, would be exempted and could disregard the convention when exporting that chemical.

When it blocked the listing of asbestos in 2006, Canada obtained the support of Kyrgyzstan, Iran, India, Ukraine and Peru (all countries closely allied to the asbestos industry). Canada is recognized as the lead player, however, and it is thought that if Canada stopped its obstruction over asbestos, the other countries would fall into line.

If Canada continues to block the listing of asbestos, it is likely that this precedent will encourage countries to do likewise regarding other hazardous chemicals. For example, the Rome meeting will also decide whether to list endosulfan, a highly toxic insecticide that is banned in many countries but used by corporations such as Dole and Del Monte on fruit plantations.

Canada's position at the Rome meeting will be critical in determining whether the convention will survive in its present form or be replaced by a pale facsimile riddled with double standards and exemptions. To date, the government refuses to say what position it will take on our behalf.

Canadians like to think we play a positive role on the world stage, but Canada killing a UN convention in order to protect asbestos sales and votes in Quebec will go on the historical record as an act of infamy.

The World Health Organization points out that asbestos is the Number 1 industrial killer in the world, just as it is in Canada. Yet, just like some arrogant colonial master, we are denying developing countries the basic right of informed consent on asbestos.

This does not represent Canadian values. We do not believe in double standards, as if the lives of people in developing countries were less worthy of protection than our own.

We are at a pivotal moment. It's time for Canada to stop acting like a rogue state and instead allow chrysotile asbestos to be listed under the Rotterdam Convention.

Kathleen Ruff, a former director of the B.C. Human Rights Commission, is a member of the Rotterdam Convention Alliance, a group of environmental and health organizations working to promote implementation of the Rotterdam Convention.

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